Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.

What happened to fantasy for me is what also happened to rock and roll. It found a common denominator for making maximum money. As a result, it lost its tensions, its anger, its edginess and turned into one big cup of cocoa.

Treasures are not won by care and forethought but by swift slaying and reckless attack.

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

Is the prisoner a prisoner because he lives in a cage or because he knows that he lives in a cage?

Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They've become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can't survive without it.

I know not which I prefer the look of—those who attack us or that which defends us!